Identity X (12 page)

Ben
began to hear the rumble of the train in the background, and the lights which
were close enough to illuminate his position on the tracks came precariously
close.  He hauled his body up and over the wall, sliding himself onto the
platform amid the deafening screech of the train horn.  Once on his feet he
staggered towards the body of the shooter as it lay before him.  The commuters
who lay crouched on the ground buried their heads further into their shoulders,
and those on the train pressed their faces against the windows to catch a
glimpse of the action.  They would add their own details to the snapshot image
before them until the story merged into a fully fledged retelling of how they
watched
a
soulless assassin pace across
the platform towards his kill.  In a single moment Ben realised that he had
become the feared, and was now the villain in anybody’s eyes but his own.  The
guilt was attributable to his hand for the atrocious act that had been carried
out, and those closest to him cowered away from his presence. 
He could hear them crying,
wimpering. 
Ben
stood beside the shooter as the train rumbled through the station, the driver
already informed that under no circumstances should he stop. 

Ben
watched
the body as it quivered
during its last moments of life like a bird caught in a set of locked feline
jaws.  Dropping to his knees at the side of his victim he felt a bewildering
sense of guilt mixed with the paradoxical sensation of satisfaction as the
shooter coughed up a small splutter of blood with what was by now nothing more
than a neural reaction.  Ben had never been a soldier, and he had never the
faintest of desires to experience war at a closer proximity than a documentary
or movie, yet as the man lay beside him awaiting the last breath of his life to
slip through his blood stained lips he imagined a combat soldier may feel
something of the same emotional ambiguity.  His breathing was hard as he
rustled through the pockets of the shooter looking for any clue as to his
identity, or what might be happening to him.  At first he found nothing except
for a half eaten pack of chewing gum in his trousers, but in the inside pocket
of his coat Ben uncovered something that bore a resemblance to an identity
card.  It was not like any card that he recognised.  There was no picture or
name, and instead just a small metal chip and a number.  As the last carriage
of the train passed through the station leaving nothing but silence behind him
as the whistle of the wind passed back into the tunnels, Ben couldn’t help but
watch the man’s face as he felt the rise and fall of his chest decline to the
point it was detectable only through touch.  The gurgle of fluids at the back
of his throat stopped bubbling and pooled into his lungs, drowning him from the
inside out.  As he took his last breath Ben felt the burden of guilt at having
taken a life, where before he had dedicated his own to saving the lives of
others.  When he had pulled the trigger for the final time sending forth his
last shot, now embedded into the heart of the man who had chased him, he had
intended to deliver nothing but death.  The shots to the stomach would have
undoubtedly been enough for him to get away, but instead he had chosen to stand
there, gun poised and ready to fight, and fire a final and devastating shot
into the heart of a stranger.  Cradling Ami in his arms
after
she died, he thought that he had seen
both sides of death after he had watched it violently take her life and also
soothe his father’s agony.  Now here was a third face to it, the most evil of
all, when death has been brought by your own hand.  He had welcomed it in and
accepted its advances.  Death had courted him, and made him promises of power,
greed and strength.  It had worked with efficiency, offering only one chance to
take its hand and finalise the agreement.  Ben had taken it willingly, only to
realise that death was no more than a charlatan, an imposter and encourager,
and who when the deed is done honours none of its promises.  He fought back his
tears and wiped his face, smudging the dirt from the tracks across his cheeks. 
He reached his hand down to take the gun which he had set to the side, but
before he could touch it he heard a voice distinguishable from any other. 

“Ben,
leave that where it is.”  Still on his knees, he turned to face the direction
from where the voice came. 

“Hannah?” 
He could barely believe his ears, or his eyes as the image of his wife formed
before him.  She wore a long beige jacket and was flanked by two men either
side of her, all of which he couldn’t help but notice were wearing similar
clothes to the dead man at his side.  “What...”

“Ben,
there is no time for us to discuss this here.  On your feet.”  She spoke in a
way that was so direct and decisive that he obeyed her without question.

“I
killed a man.”  His voice trembled as his stare alternated between his victim
and his wife. She looked for a moment as if she felt sorry for him. 
How
would she ever forgive me for this
, he thought to himself as he stood to
his feet.

“Don’t
feel bad for it.  He would have put a bullet in your head gladly, had you not
killed him first.” 

He
waited before he spoke again, unable to focus on anything but the burgundy pool
of blood forming underneath the waist of the dead shooter.  “Why did he want to
kill me?”

“Because
you are already dead, Ben.  There are no options left for you.  They will kill
you.  They will not stop until they do.  They have hundreds of these men, and
each one of them will die before they give up their duty,” she said,
looking at
the body on the floor, “and
four of them are standing next to me right now.”  Ben looked up at the men at
his wife’s side and contemplated in what possible reality his wife would be
flanked by four assassins.  “You are going to walk out of this station with me,
and you will get into the van parked outside.”

“If I
don’t?”

“Then
we will kill you here and now.  I will do it because you will leave me with no
other choice.  If you come with me, if you trust me, I will protect you.”

“Hannah
you wouldn’t kill me.  You couldn’t.”

“Your
choice, Ben.  Will you come with us?”

“Hannah,”
he said as he began to raise his voice, “what about our son?”

“Miss,
we need to move, one way or another.”  The man to Hannah’s left hand side had
his hand on his gun and was pushing Hannah to take action.  He paid Ben no
attention, as if he were as insignificant as a crushed ant under his shoe.  Ben
felt an overwhelming desire to beat the man to a pulp, strip him of his
interruptions so that he could speak freely to his wife.  He tried to tell
himself that they were controlling her, forcing her into something, and that he
had to find a way to save her.  Yet the more he tried to convince himself, the
more unlikely the story seemed, until the point where it became utterly
unbelievable.

“Ben,”
she shouted, “they are coming.  “With me, or against me?”  He thought about his
options which seemed slight in any stretch of the imagination.  He thought
about the loaded gun on the floor beside him, but knew that there was no chance
of him being able to take down all four of them.  A radio buzzed on her waist
band and through the crackle of the static he heard a voice announce what to
him sounded only like a threatening confirmation of what Hannah was saying. 
They’re
approaching.

“Last
chance Ben
,
”
she said, pulling at his jacket
  One of the men on Hannah’s
left whipped out his gun and held it up in Ben's direction, as if to confirm
her offer.  He pointed it directly at his head, and he noticed that Hannah
swallowed hard as her eyes begged him to accept her offer.

“With
you.”  He knew she was his only hope, and that she held all the cards.  The gun
held out towards him dropped to the side of the man who held it, and the two
men on her right stepped towards him.  One of them held up a small device,
similar to a gun but smaller and with a brightly coloured fluid in the chamber
where he now would expect to see bullets.  The agent pushed it against Ben’s
neck and
pulled
the trigger.  I
t
felt sharp, as if something scratched at him.

“Don’t
struggle Ben.”  After a sharp prick to his neck that felt like an insect bite,
instantly warm and swollen, he felt his eye lids heavy and his head woozy.  “Go
with them
,
”
he heard her say.
 

Half
walking and half dragged, Ben disappeared into the shadows of the tunnel with
the two unknown men of whom he had no idea if he should trust with his life or
not, but had decided to only because they were with Hannah.  In a medicated
delirium, he questioned if he should even trust Hannah considering that she
appeared to be the only thing that stood between his life and death only
moments before, but she was for now his only option.  As the two goons dragged
him along, a cinematic account of the morning played out before him, as visions
of his marital bed, his wife, and the last time he held Matthew in his arms
filtered through his mind in crackling and nebulous images.  He became aware that
his feet were failing him, and he felt the bump as his effort became
increasingly passive as he was dragged towards his unknown destination. 
Suddenly he became aware of the light, and with a pull from above and a push
from below, he was hauled from a tunnel and into the street through an
inconspicuous works entrance.  Whilst they bundled him into a waiting van, only
meters away Hannah was explaining how two of her men had chased him into the
tunnel, and that she would now meet them back at her base after the former Mr.
Stone had once again evaded capture.  As she stepped back into her own car and
started her journey towards her base, she soon found herself trailing the back
of a black van inside which lay Ben, her husband and father of her son, drugged
and unconscious.  It would be
a
few
hours until
he woke up, and she hoped desperately by that time she would have worked out
what the hell she was going to do.

Ben woke just
over
two
hours later on a bed of cold concrete.  As he had become accustomed, he had a
headache, the type that follows a period of drinking, when the brain is swollen
to the point that it pushes against the skull causing a global headache, a
helmet of pain tightened across his scalp.  He was badly dehydrated from the
effects of whatever it was that Hannah and her team of associates had
administered in the side of his neck. He had a small droplet of spit drooling
down his cheek, which he licked back inwards through chapped lips so not to be
wasted, temporarily providing relief for the dry and granular feeling in his
mouth.  He raised his fingers towards his neck and he felt the swelling from
the injection.  He had a tight nervous feeling in the bottom of his stomach,
which he thought likely to be the consequences of the perpetual hormonal surges
that had helped keep him alive.  However there was enough reason to doubt that
it was even still Friday, and considered that a better explanation would be the
fact that since late Wednesday night he hadn’t eaten a single thing, and had
been drugged at least once, but most likely twice.  Pushing himself to his feet
he rubbed his head frantically, trying to shift some of the haziness that he
felt as he propped himself up first onto his knees and then reluctantly back
down onto his backside when he realised that movement at the present moment was
less comfortable and more torturous than he had anticipated.  He also soon
realised that he was wearing a donated shirt, much like hospital wear, and he
felt as if he looked somewhere between a doctor and a patient and was grateful
for the absence of the congealed blood drenched shirt.

It took no more than a passing moment to
establish his surroundings.  He was enclosed in a room no larger than two
meters square, with a ceiling low enough that he might not be able to fully
stand up, which only added to his sense of entrapment and claustrophobia.
 The floor was grey concrete, the same as
the walls.  There were no windows, and the only source of light was a tatty old
strip light above his head that trailed exposed and damaged wires tacked onto
the ceiling and the wall
,
and buzzed constantly
. 
Just below the point where the wires exited through the corner of the room
where the walls met the ceiling there was a small video camera. He didn’t know
much about closed circuit television recording equipment, but to him that’s
what it looked like and he assumed therefore that somebody must be watching
him.

With no stimulation from inside his bleak
prison-like cell his thoughts condensed into repeatedly reliving everything
that he could remember from the past day, along with an unnatural preoccupation
for finding a flaw in the cellular room that may permit his escape.  In the
space of only a few hours there had been an attempt on his life, Ami had been
killed in front of him, and he had become a murderer.  On top of that, as if it
wasn’t already enough, Ami had told him that every element of the life that he
knew or that he really held dear to his heart was formulated through a web of
lies and deceit, a theory which gained a lot of ground with Hannah’s arrival at
the underground station right before he was brought to this room.  Up until
that point, the precariousness of his situation had been equalled only by his
desire to seek the safety of his wife and child.  Even thoughts of his
research, which until that point he had assumed meant more to him than anything
else, waned in the very real prospect of never seeing his family again.  Now
Hannah was just another face not to be trusted.  He had no idea of the level of
her deceit.  He had no idea what she was going to do with him, now that she had
got him here.  Maybe this was just another plot to catch him without causing
too much of a scene. 
That bitch,
he thought.  He could have never
imagined raising his hand to her, but he found himself entertaining thoughts of
striking her, blacking her eye or cutting her lip.  He imagined how it might
feel to be that person, the one that does harm, that belittles and denies
another person a normal healthy life.  Then he reminded himself that he was now
a murderer and that he should know how that feels very well already. 

On the other side of the door he could
hear the thud of footsteps. They were not gentle, and didn’t sound like
Hannah’s high-heeled size six footsteps.  Rather, they sounded like the dull
thud of a male boot.  He imagined them to be heavy and murderous like the
shooters from earlier on that day, before he remembered that he had no evidence
to accuse the shooter of being murderous, because he didn’t really think intent
counted or was sufficient to make such a claim. 

If she was to be believed, from what Hannah
had told him
the
shooter
had
indeed wanted to kill him.  He had been a terrible shot though, and Ben
wondered if perhaps it had been his first assignment and that he had never
really killed anybody before.  It would explain his poor shot, and the fact that
he had been outsmarted by a man who had never before held a gun with any
criminal intent.  As a result of his wandering mind, he found himself stumbling
over a whole new level of guilt, based solely on speculation but which seemed
not only entirely plausible, but a good enough reason to question his right to
ever see his son again. 

As the footsteps stopped at what sounded
like just outside the door, another grey structure which he only just realised
had no handle on his side, he became acutely aware of the reality that he had
no idea who or what lay behind it.  He had no recollection of what had happened
to him since he had been with Hannah at the underground station
when
he had
allowed
himself be drugged.  What a fool he
really was.  No wonder they had managed to deceive him so impressively.   It
could be anyone on the other side of that door.  Maybe Hannah never even got
him back after he had been dragged away.  Maybe her intentions were good and
she too ha
s
been fooled.  He didn’t leave
with Hannah, after all. 
Oh God, let Hannah be here.  Let her be the one who
has imprisoned me
.  Of all people he would be likely to trust at this
moment she was the only candidate, in spite of the fact that he had already
branded her untrustworthy.  Under the weight of his uncertainty he couldn’t
really decide who he trusted, if anybody at all.  His head was throbbing too,
making even breathing painful.  His random thoughts were abruptly cut dead with
the delivery of a tray of mediocre looking food through a small inward opening
portal at the bottom of the door.

“Let me out!” Ben yelled, as he clambered
over the tray, tipping a glass of orange juice over, sending it spilling to the
floor. “I want to talk to Hannah! Let me out!”  He gave no consideration to the
possibility that it may not be Hannah and her team on the other side of the
door, but he took the offering of food as a moderately warm and friendly
gesture.  He banged against the door with a clenched fist, encouraged by the
knowledge that there was
at
least
somebody on
the other side of it.  His demands went unanswered, and as the hopelessness of
his situation hit, knowing that he was fully under their control, and for the
fool that he was beginning to assume himself to be, in a situation that he had
willingly placed himself in, he realised that it was pointless to waste his
energy.  He stumbled back into a seated position on the floor, propping his
back up against the wall of the door, and he began to salivate
so
he dragged the tray of food towards him
with his fingertips.  He devoured the dry edged cheese and ham sandwich and
banana as if it were a succulent and juicy fillet steak, never once considering
the possibility of it being laced with another wondrous drug.  It did little to
soothe the headache, but it did settle the emptiness in his stomach.  He rubbed
in small circular motions at his temples to try to find some relief for his
pain.  He became aware of something pulling at his arm, and as he rotated it
inwards for a closer inspection and pulled up the short sleeve of his donated
attire he saw that the wound on his arm had been rather expertly dressed. 
Taking a certain amount of personal satisfaction in his decision to be drugged
and dragged away, he congratulated himself that he was still alive.  His
vainglorious approach was short lived, as he saw that there was not a drop of
orange juice left in the plastic cup.  Most of it had been spilt on the floor
as a result of his haste, but in pursuit of quenching his thirst, he proceeded
to drink the juice in feline fashion whilst simultaneously chastising himself
for his continued display of stupidity. 

After what felt like an hour he heard
more footsteps, but this time they were softer and lighter.  They stopped on
the outside of the door, and after a short electronic buzz the door popped
open.  From the space that formed as the door opened inwards, Hannah appeared.
She walked through and closed the door behind her, resting both hands behind
her as if contemplating what to do next.  For a moment husband and wife simply
stared at each other, paralysed by their sense of familiarity and yet obvious
void of truth that lay between them.

“We’re being watched, so don’t try
anything.  OK?”  He nodded in agreement as he got up onto his feet.  He
regarded his wife with fresh eyes; it was a type of vision that had developed
over the course of the day.  There was nothing about the world that he lived in
that he could trust as the truth anymore.  Physically she looked the same, with
her blond hair fixed in a twist behind her head.  Her imposingly beautiful face
somehow always appeared as if it was shrouded in silk, the only imperfections
the palest blue eyes, the same colour as the oceans of Bali.  There was a part
of him that wanted to hold her and be held by her in the familiarity of an
embrace that would make the reality of the current situation seem so distant. 
Yet there was something tangibly different about her today, and he felt the
sharp corners of an edge that he had never detected before.  There was
something colder and focussed about her approach as she stood in front of him
with her arms folded across her breasts, and as he traced through his memories
to find a hint of this same feeling from the past he realised he had never seen
it before.  He also realised that there was a small dribble of drying orange
juice on his chin, something that he was only alerted to as he followed her
gaze to the offending drop, and he promptly wiped it away with his palm.

“Hannah what is going on? What the hell
is happening to me?”  She motioned for him to sit down on the raised block of
concrete lining the back wall, and he did so without question, never once
taking his eyes off her.  He sat down like a schoolboy awaiting discipline for
a punishable misdemeanour, or somebody who was about to get bad news and who
was clinging desperately to the last moments of ignorance before the facts that
would render his life forever changed.  She stood in front of him, arms folded,
pacing back and forth.

“Ben, there are things going on that you
have no idea about.”  The sure as death hilarity of that statement made him
want to grab her by the strained tendons in her neck, scream down her ear, ask
her if she thought he was stupid.  He found the idea merged very well with his
previous violent thoughts, and when visualised together formed an image of
himself that he found unrecognisable.  
How quickly a person can change,
he
thought,
given the right stimuli. 
He sat patiently instead, staring at
her and waiting for her to speak.  “What do you remember last?”

“We were at the underground station on
Sixtieth.”

“No, no”, she waved her arms in dismissal
which for some reason settled him more than when she stood with them crossed. 
“Before today. You came home on Wednesday night.  We drank some champagne. 
What next?”

He scoured his mind for the minutiae of
detail, the smallest recollection that may help him to understand. “I remember
going to bed, you dragged me.  We were celebrating.”

“NEMREC.”

“Yes, NEMREC.”  He was quite surprised
that she had remembered the name of the formula, and had the urge to ask if she
knew what it stood for.  “After that I woke up today with no identity, Mark is
trying to kill me, Ami is dead, and you,” he paused as he looked away from his
wife, unable to hold her gaze when her duplicity hung between them as
hypnotically as a pendulum.  Had he looked at her, he would have seen a hint of
guilt on her face.  “I don’t even know what to say to you, because I have no
idea what you are doing here, or what you want with me.”

“What did Ami tell you?”

“She told me that nothing is real.  That
you are not real.  That you are not really my wife.”  As soon as he said it, he
wondered how she knew he had met Ami.  Panic rose inside of him, bubbling up as
if his blood had reached boiling point. 
Could it be that she knew Ami?
 
More importantly, could she know that he had feelings for her?  He decided it
was best not to say anything in the interests of not incriminating himself
further.  Simultaneously he found himself clinging to the hope that she was not
responsible for Ami’s death and the brutal acts that he had witnessed earlier. 

“I am your wife.”

“But you don’t work as a secretary like I
thought you did.  I don’t know the truth about you, do I?”